The Book Thief Review

The Book Thief, Zusak. No. I didn’t hate I Am the Messenger, but I hated this. I gave up after the first chapter or so, and the chapters were very brief. It made me long for Mandy Patinkin. I think the lesson here may be that if you have a stunt premise, you need to go easy on the stunt writing style. Of course, easy on the stunt writing style is almost always the way to go, irrespective of your premise.

The Historian Review

The Historian, Kostova. Yes. I found very little to dislike about this book. I hear that lots of folks disliked it, and my librarian speculates that there may have been a reflexive "I don’t like genre fiction" effect. It’s enough to make me sympathize with Harlan Ellison’s quest to get his works out of the SF ghetto. Whatever aspects others may have disliked, my complaints are minor: there are multiple narrative time lines, some presented in epistolary form, and others related differently, but there is so comparatively little action on what one might think of as the main narrative line that I couldn’t help wondering whether some other structure might have been less jarring (and, yes, there are fine reasons for going with the epistolary tradition, and I surely can’t advocate the book being any longer, so maybe it was the best way to go). I was also distracted by "a historian" vs "an historian". I’m quite sure Kostova was consistent as to which characters said which, but I think she may have just made the Americans say "a" and the non-Americans "an". Given how long ago some of the action takes place, I would have expected even the Americans of the time to use "an". There’s also at least one section where Kostova renders dialect via non-standard spellings of words, and that pulled my head right out of the book every time. Complaints notwithstanding, I think Kostova did an admirable job with the material.

Web 2.0 perspective

I’m at a professional training on web 2.0 in libraries, and the point was made that blogging (and other 2.0ish type deals) are interactive, a back and forth conversation. But I’ve got comments turned off on my blog, and very few people read the posts to begin with. Every new (successful) technology is used to talk to other people. I’m just talking to myself.

But I’m also talking to Craig: Hey! Look at busmonster!

Who asked for it?

Yet still more research into how to do something that will almost certainly be misused. I do wonder whether Flexitral‘s theory would allow them to reduce the "hundreds" of chemicals the olfactograph requires.
Update: poking around Flexitral’s pages led me to this bit of marketing to a narrow audience: "the first carnation aromachemical incorporating a thioether moiety." Finally!